I realize that I'm late to the party with this, but it seems like removing the confirmation field for data critical to maintaining an account is a pretty bad idea that we'll end up reverting when people inevitably complain.

We don't have an email confirmation field on Forumatic and just today, I have received two bounce notifications today; one to fr*****g1@otmail.com and another to ki******40@gamil.com. There's also to****dz@gmal.com and a bunch of others with similar mistakes.

The username is at least emailed to the user in the welcome email, but the email address and password should have confirmation boxes, else this is going to be a huge headache for administrators.

The question that was raised in this topic was whether a second input field would actually improve that. Would people not simply copy and paste the typo to the second field? Do we have a good way of trying this out and collecting stats?

It also seems like hotmail/gmail typos would be fixed by what was suggested and discussed in the last few posts of this topic better than a second confirmation field?

naderman wrote:The question that was raised in this topic was whether a second input field would actually improve that. Would people not simply copy and paste the typo to the second field? Do we have a good way of trying this out and collecting stats?

Those who reflexively Ctrl+A => Ctrl+C => Tab => Ctrl+V the form are also the ones least likely to make a mistake on their email address. On the other hand, the vast majority of people follow what the form wants them to do, which in this case is entering the address a second time.

I conveniently happened to be with my parents and asked my mom to register an account on phpBB.com (and recorded her doing it, if you don't believe me ). As expected, she filled in both forms.

naderman wrote:It also seems like hotmail/gmail typos would be fixed by what was suggested and discussed in the last few posts of this topic better than a second confirmation field?

Yes, however I don't necessarily see why it would be more common for typos to appear in the domain rather than the user. If the typo is in the user, we won't be able to recognize it as a typo, but some of them will still be typos.

I think this is the same as confirmation boxes. Having undo options is a lot better and doesn't *beep* users off.

So we should work on having the email address the confirmation was sent to displayed in huge red letters after registration with a big "OH NOES! That was the wrong address!" button, which allows changing email address after registration.

We should probably also store registration info in a cookie, so that if the user tries to register again or login with a nonexistent username/email (if we allow that), it will inform them that they just created an account with email address X, and display a button "change email address on new account".

I think these steps combined with the AJAX solution to common email hosts would be ideal for both power and novice users.

Oleg wrote:We could add a checkbox "I want to enter my email address again", which if checked would make the second email address box appear and then the two would be checked for equality.

I doubt anyone would ever voluntarily check that. If you're not able to enter your email address correctly you won't check that box either.

I agree here.

And I agree with adding a way for users to change their email address just after registration. Just note that that form should also be CAPTCHA'd so that they can't just sit there and change it to a ton of different addresses to overload the email server or spam or whatever.

I do custom MODs. PM for a quote!View My: MODs | PortfolioPlease do NOT contact for support via PM or email.
Remember, the enemy's gate is down.